I do most of my art photography “on location”. My main use of backdrops and studio-type lighting is for seated portraits.

A few months ago, a fairly experienced and established model contacted me about doing a shoot. She was in town temporarily going to school and would be leaving mid-November. I told her I would like a do a shoot with her, but I needed a shooting plan.

Well, the end of October comes and I’m still trying to secure a location for the shoot I had in mind! In short, the location arrangement fell through and time was running out.

So I decided to do the shoot in a makeshift studio at my home. I even set up a little “set” to use for the first part of the session.

I found myself very anxiety-ridden about it because the only “art” photography I’ve done with a studio setup was near the beginning of my photography career…and those were pretty rough (e.g., I had to use a fair amount of Photoshop to “clean them up” and get rid of things like distracting light stand legs, etc.).

We did the session at night in a mostly unheated space (I had a small space heater going) that was probably in the lower 50s fahrenheit. It was dark outside, so the only light available was whatever I supplied.

The compactness of the space and trying to frame shots that didn’t pull in extraneous elements surrounding my studio setup made things difficult and annoying, but I think we still pulled out some good stuff.

I’ll be posting some of it over the next few weeks. Here’s one that doesn’t even try to hide one of the studio lights I was using (I actually like the look of studio lighting and often include it in some of my shots..maybe because it’s a unique element that’s not often available when I’m photographing; of course I could crop it out if I really wanted to…:p).

Click image to see against dark background..

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